Penance Before Absolution

The eagerness of smart young people to join in the circle jerk back in 2002 and 2003 was one of the more disillusioning aspects of the whole business — and not a bad argument for reinstating the military draft, if only as a measure, as Dr. Johnson once said about hanging, to concentrate the mind wonderfully. A great number of them joined the circle jerk in order to secure their credentials in the Serious People Club. They joined in support of a war in which thousands of people their age would be killed and maimed. At least give Ezra credit. He seems to feel pretty badly about the whole business. Terrific. He won't grow up to be Richard Perle. But this? I'm sorry, but this is unmitigated codswallop.

But at the core of my support for the war was an analytical failure I think about often: Rather than looking at the war that was actually being sold, I'd invented my own Iraq war to support — an Iraq war with different aims, promoted by different people, conceptualized in a different way and bearing little resemblance to the project proposed by the Bush administration. In particular, I supported Kenneth Pollack's Iraq war...But Pollack was clear-eyed about the task ahead. Iraq, he said, shouldn't be America's top priority. We should first focus on destroying al-Qaeda. We should then work on the Israeli- Palestinian conflict. Only then should we turn to Hussein. Moreover, when and if we did invade Iraq, we should do so only as part of a coordinated, multilateral operation that takes as its fundamental premise that rebuilding Iraq "is likely to be the most important and difficult part." On National Public Radio's Fresh Air, Pollack said that "if we do it wrong we could create as many problems as we solve." Pollack's book was a key document in the run-up to the war.

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OK, even if you accept that Pollack was more mark than he was con-man — which I don't, entirely — why would a book making the case as Klein describes ever serve as a "key document in the run-up to the war" since, at the time if its publication, it was plain to every sentient primate on the planet that the Bush people were going to go to war in Iraq simply to go to war in Iraq? They'd already abandoned the fight against al Qaeda in Afghanistan. They'd shown little or no interest in Israel and Palestine after 9/11. Their plans for "rebuilding Iraq" were completely limited to which of their cronies would get how much of the oil. Kenneth Pollack's "reluctant hawk" routine was made obviously obsolete the minute George W. Bush took his hand off the Bible. Why would it convince anyone in 2003 that the people actually running the war took any of those preconditions seriously. For all the relevance Pollack's imaginary war had on the decisions made to start the real one, Klein might as well say he supported the Iraq war based on the mumblings of Sun Tzu or the military theories espoused by Peter Pan.

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It is important to remember only one thing in this week in which we ought to be memorializing how representative democracy can suicide itself. There were people who were right. And there was a great effort inside and outside of government — from the Right and, alas, from the left as well — to make sure that the people who were right were not heard by the country that would be expected to send its sons and daughters to be killed.

In the New Yorker, David Remnick called it "the most comprehensive and convincing case for the use of force in Iraq." On the New York Times op-ed page, Bill Keller said it was "surely the most influential book of this season." At Slate, Chris Suellentrop joked that "the Bush administration should consider a last-ditch effort to obtain Security Council approval: a Paris airlift that drops thousands of French translations of Kenneth Pollack's 'The Threatening Storm' over the city." Pollack even appeared on "The Oprah Winfrey Show." Yes, Oprah.

I will hazard the same guess that I hazarded at the time. The members of the liberal political elite in this country were piss-down-their-legs scared of two things in 2002. First, that the next attack would land on their heads, since most of them live and work in or near what were presumed to be the primary target zones, both of which actually had been already. And second, that they would get called fifth-columnists (or worse) by the triumphalism of the incipient American imperial adventure in southwest Asia. Nobody wants to be George McGovern, after all. So they found their excuses, and they found in Kenneth Pollack somebody who would give them a Potemkin war they could support. And then they signed on with Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld and all the rest of them.

This wasn't obvious "as the war went on," as Klein claims. This was obvious from the very start, and there were people who said so. But they were marginalized by, among other people, the members of Kenneth Pollack's extended fan club. Chalmers Johnson never made talked to Oprah.

We got our war. More to the point, we got Bush's war, which was, in the end, the only war on offer.

In the end? There never was anything else on offer. Paul O'Neill told us that Bush talked about going after Saddam Hussein in his very first Cabinet meeting. It was one of the first things Rumsfeld thought of on the afternoon of September 11, 2001.

In conversation, Pollack comes off much as he did in his original book: curious and questioning. He worries openly about what he got wrong and what he could have done better. He's careful to avoid articulating overwhelming doctrines or overly moralistic arguments.

That's too bad, because the Iraq war was a crime against democracy. Let him go to Walter Reed and avoid those pesky moralistic arguments.

"We'll never know," Pollack replied. "History doesn't reveal its alternatives. But I think the evidence out there is that we could have handled this much better than we did, and that it didn't have to be this bad. The best evidence for that is the surge. In 18 months, we shut down the civil war and reversed the direction of Iraqi politics."

In brief, fck you. History "revealed its alternatives" at the time. You did your damndest to make a buck while shutting them down, and 65 people died in car bombings this week as a demonstration of how the surge reversed the direction of Iraqi politics. As for Ezra, well, he should go and sin no more. It is encouraging that he no longer believes in fairy tales.